CalTech Student Awarded for Optical Research

Photonics.comJul 2004
WASHINGTON, July 1 -- The Optical Society of America (OSA), Bookham Technology and New Focus Inc., a division of Bookham, annoumnced today that Jason McKeever, a physics graduate student at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), is the grand-prize winner of the 2004 annual OSA Bookham/New Focus Student Award. He was honored for his research and presentation, "Single photon generation 'on demand' from a single trapped atom strongly coupled to an optical cavity," presented at the 2004 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics/International Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/IQEC) in May in San Francisco.

McKeever’s research in cavity quantum electrodynamics focused on the trapping of single cesium atoms strongly coupled to a high finesse optical cavity. In the past two years, McKeever along with his research team, has reached several milestones, beginning with a major extension of single atom trapping times followed by the experimental realization of a one-atom laser, and eventually the deterministic generation of single photons. The purpose of this line of research is the development of quantum networks using atoms inside cavities as nodes, which can be linked optically.

Seven finalists for the OSA Bookham/New Focus Student Award delivered oral presentations of their research at CLEO/IQEC. The competition attracted more than 30 submissions from institutions in the US and abroad. Other finalists were Lukas Chrostowski, University of California Berkeley; Kevin Holman, JILA/University of Colorado; James Edward Carey, Harvard University; Paulo C. Dainese Jr., State University at Campinas (Unicamp), Brazil; Christiano J. S. de Matos, Imperial College, London; and Aparna Bhatnagar, Stanford University.

The grand-prize award is $5000; finalists each receive $1500.

The OSA Bookham/New Focus Student Award was created in 1997 with the support of Milton Chang and New Focus Inc. to honor new innovators within the optics community.